Browsing Posts tagged Heartburn

— Our thanks to Maneka Gandhi for permission to republish this post, which originally appeared on the Web site of People for Animals, India’s largest animal welfare organization, on September 27, 2012.

Mark Bittman is a food columnist with the New York Times. He suffered from hyperacidity and took pills most of his life. Recently he was told by a friend to stop drinking milk or any of its forms—curd, cheese etc. He did, and four months later not only had his acidity disappeared but most of his other health problems vanished as well.

He wrote a column on it for the paper. Thirteen hundred people wrote to the paper the next day saying that they had had similar experiences. “In them, people outlined their experiences with dairy and health problems as varied as heartburn, migraines, irritable bowel syndrome, colitis, eczema, acne, hives, asthma (‘When I gave up dairy, my asthma went away completely’), gall bladder issues, body aches, ear infections, colic, ‘seasonal allergies,’ rhinitis, chronic sinus infections and more. One writer mentioned an absence of canker sores after cutting out dairy; I realized I hadn’t had a canker sore—which I’ve gotten an average of once a month my whole life—in four months.”

Doctors and the medical establishment are the last people to consult about milk. While they will admit that many people are lactose–intolerant—meaning they are allergic to milk and will suffer digestive problems if they drink it—they will confine this to 1 percent of the population. But they refuse to study the links between dairy and such a broad range of ailments.

If you go to a doctor with an acidity problem (or heartburn, as it is known) the gastroenterologist will prescribe a proton pump inhibitor, or PPI, a drug that blocks the production of acid in the stomach. But PPIs don’t address underlying problems, nor are they “cures.” They address only the symptom, not its cause, and they are only effective while the user takes them.

Most of these heartburn cases have a story to tell of how they solved their problems by eliminating dairy. Hundreds of people wrote in to Bittman saying that they stopped drinking milk by accident—a vacation where milk was not available or they were with non-milk-drinking friends or family—and their symptoms disappeared, only to return when they started their “normal” diet again. continue reading…

"Service Animal" Scammers (New Yorker): An increasing number of your neighbors have been keeping company with their pets in human-only establishments simply by claiming that the creatures are their licensed companion animals and are necessary to their mental well-being.